Original Blessing: 9 January 2022

There is an irony in the fact that New England is one of the most secular regions of our nation, right behind the Left Coast, while my home state of Virginia is populated by religious charlatans and wanna-be authoritarians. Exactly the opposite was true during the Colonial era, when New England had theocratic leanings, while the Cavaliers of Virginia were often escaping the Puritan takeover of England.

Despite all of that, the fervor of the Great Awakenings, countless conmen with their golden tablets, lost tribes, and intergalactic dictators, (for who can forget Xenu!), America was never really quite as pious as it likes to think. That has been even more true since the Second World War, when church became as much a social and civic space as a religious space. Belief mattered less and less, as we peddled spiritual goods and services, fluff and feel-good and a get-rich gospel, or maybe just a place to hold a potluck and play bridge. No wonder folks are buying into goop and crystals. As least they are asked to believe something, even if absurd and lazy.

But belief matters. Purpose, vision, values, belief… all of these matter. We make decisions every day based on what we believe. The last four years, and the pandemic especially, have been a vivid reminder of how important belief is, from kids in cages and seditionists in the House to hundreds of thousands dead… dead!… that did not need to die from a pandemic that could have been better managed but was instead politicized.

So today, we are going to speak of core belief, not just an abstract consideration of the baptism of Jesus, but a living theology, then look at an analog in a very real problem in our nation, the problem of policing.

Baptism was the invention of John, traditionally called the Baptist, though these days called, with more clarity, the Baptizer. The ritual of immersion in the Jordan was adapted from the mikveh or ritual immersion of the Hebrew purity code. John’s baptism served as an initiation into the closed repentance community. Traditional stories about the familial relationship between John and Jesus are unprovable, as are claims that Jesus was baptized by John or maybe, in an uncomfortable stretch for some, might have been an off-shoot of John’s ministry. Notice I didn’t say “it didn’t happen,” just that we don’t know for sure, and it is not critical to our understanding.

There was likely to have been some competition between the two movements, the followers of John and the followers of Jesus, reflected in the way the gospels position the two men, though there was a significant difference. While John’s movement had that ritual immersion, you were either in or you were out, the movement around Jesus appears to have been porous, as radically open as the table fellowship. Jesus does not practice baptism in the gospels, and the inclusion of baptism as a practice among the followers of Jesus may have been more about co-opting John’s movement. But the Christianity that evolved, the one recorded as early as Paul’s epistles, was marked by two rites, the two recognized as sacraments in our Protestant tradition: baptism and the table fellowship that included the re-telling of the Last Supper acts of Jesus.

Scripture records Paul as baptizing households, but there is nothing in the Christian testament about baptizing infants specifically. Baptism was the public ritual by which one joined this odd little cult that grew out of a Hebrew reform movement.

Two things would change that, two men. The first, Constantine, legalized Christianity, with it eventually becoming the imperial default. If everybody is presumed to be a Christian, then you need a reason for the ritual. Fortunately, there was Augustine of Hippo. A convert from another religion called Manichaeism, Augustine imported into Christianity the belief that life was a struggle between light and dark, dark being an actual thing, a force. Add to that the convert’s disgust with his life prior to conversion, and especially his own sexual conduct, and you get a clear theology of original sin, an idea that is completely foreign to Hebrew belief, to Rabbinic Judaism, to the teaching of Jesus. Read Augustine’s invention onto the Garden of Eden myth, and you get children springing from the womb already broken and marked for damnation, which, if true, says a lot about God, and none of it good.

Reform Christianity would make a definitive break with the heresy of original sin, dividing only over whether it was acceptable to baptize infants in a provisional way until they were old enough to confirm their commitment, or if baptism was only acceptable for adults who believed, the form practiced at that time by the Anabaptist ancestors of today’s Amish, Mennonites, and Brethren. While most Christians have chosen to ignore the simplicity preached by the Anabaptist tradition, some have adopted the “believer’s baptism” theology, in some cases adding a magic incantation that triggers salvation. The God who punishes humankind for eternity also demands the torture and murder of the Cross.

Original sin gave theological sanction to colonialism, for the untamed savage was condemned without the action of the good European invaders who could save your soul at the cost of your land and your labor and sometimes your lives, for there are cases where the conquistadors and other Christian agents of genocide baptized indigenous people immediately before murdering them.

But as I said earlier, we’ve allowed the social and the civic to eclipse the theological, and all too often don’t take the time to articulate and educate, especially necessary in a church like our own United Church of Christ, so often filled with refugees from other inhospitable and abusive forms of faith.

So let me be very clear: though you have freedom of conscience, original sin is not our theology. Babies do not come from the womb cursed. They come from the womb blessed.

Rather than orienting life towards controlling the power of darkness, we instead are in the business of calling out the light, the love, the goodness, and the holy. We seek to empower rather than control, to liberate rather than incarcerate.

Not that we don’t acknowledge sin. We do. But sin is not our nature. Sin is our failure to live into our nature.

Mind you, our big brains still sit on little lizard brains, that’s biology, and many fear the unknown and uncontrolled. If there is anything that is analogous to original sin, it is our fear, which prompts us to do some stupid and awful things. Which may be exactly why Jesus says “Be not afraid, for I am with you.”

Where do you start? With a rotten God and broken humans in need of repair, the repair made possible by a bunch of men if you’ll just make a recurring donation of $29 a month and we’ll send you some healing water? Or a good God that works in mysterious ways and we don’t need murder or magic water, just love and community?

Which bring me back to that analog.

The same folks who lost their heads when Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the National Anthem, claiming he had disrespected the flag, happily disfigure it themselves in the same black shades of the SS, but with a thin blue line. They believe that their fellow citizens are lawless and must be controlled, that they are the thin blue line between order and chaos.

Now, to be honest, they mostly think that about their fellow citizens with brown-skin, or accents, or who simply have the misfortune of being poor. But since white cops all moved to the suburbs to avoid desegregation back in the ’60s, the idea that people need to be controlled through the power of a militarized police force, an occupation army, has become entrenched. We know the results, and no number of feel good videos of cops playing basketball and sharing sandwiches with kids in the ghetto can erase the video of Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd, of cops brutalizing and murdering with almost complete impunity every single day in America.

It matters where you start. And the narrative that people, and especially people of color, are fundamentally broken, is promoted by people who profit from it, from police training consultants and police unions, from Neo-fascist commentators and all who peddle fear instead of hope.

And every single one of us knows the truth. Cops don’t make communities safe. And for people of color, cops make public space unsafe. Heck, cops make private space unsafe, shot dead in your own bed or while watching television in your own apartment.

Cops might put a cap on certain forms of violence, but what makes communities safe is job, affordable housing and affordable childcare, access to doctors and fresh food, treatment for addiction and mental health. And while we’re dreaming of a world that calls forth our best, how about fewer weapons in our communities, weapons that are meant for one purpose only, to kill humans. For the constant threat of white male violence is a double-edged sword that always wounds the one who wields it.

Where do we start? With the assumption that humans are sinful? That citizens are lawless? That only a priest and the blood of Jesus can save us? That order only comes from the barrel of a Glock?

It matters what you believe. It matters that we can articulate what we believe. Why should those who peddle fear have a monopoly on religion?

Ours is a faith of original blessing, the proclaims the goodness of God, and a love so powerful that the worst violence law enforcement and empire could inflict could not kill it.

That is our story. And I’m sticking with it.

Amen.